


somewhere only we know

by jonphaedrus



Category: Fire Emblem: Soen no Kiseki/Akatsuki no Megami | Fire Emblem Path of Radiance/Radiant Dawn
Genre: 3 Sentence Fiction, 30 Prompt List, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-14
Updated: 2013-11-14
Packaged: 2018-01-01 14:06:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1044836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jonphaedrus/pseuds/jonphaedrus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>a thirty prompt challenge, done with three-sentence fics, for Sephiran and Zelgius.</p>
            </blockquote>





	somewhere only we know

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rethira](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rethira/gifts).



> this was way harder than i expected it to be. some of these were really hard to do for a fantasy universe (and thus got kind of abstract and weird?) and i apologise for those.

O1 ; moonlight 

He's met Leanne and the White Prince, with their golden moonlight hair, honey and milk. Sephiran's hair is dark, the shadows behind the moonlight. His skin tastes like shade and shadow, but is sweet—like the moonlight vanished in his reflection, swallowed by his skin.

 

O2 ; ocean breeze

He watches the way that the Hawks and Ravens swing through the sky, carried by the updrafts from the water. He thinks, longingly, that if he could wish for one thing, it would be to give Sephiran back his wings. Instead, now, the man's feet are stuck to the ground, and his wish for the sky haunts the back of his eyes.

 

O3 ; hot

His touch is scalding, the heat of adoration in his eyes burns the cobwebs out of the inside of his soul. Zelgius' oaths all brand of the truth, never questioning anything. He finds the aches in Sephiran's broken, tortured, cracked soul and fills them with lancing, crying heat.

 

O4 ; cold

His lies are cold, painting his lips like poison and drenching his hands like blood. They fill his insides until he feels fit to burst, clawed apart like old cloth, his seams tearing from frozen regret.

Zelgius does not mind the seams, he does not mind the freeze-burn on his fingers—his breath is warm, and his hands are too.

 

O5 ; fire

His anger is fire, burning deep inside his body. His anger is explosive, his anger is vicious and hateful and spiteful and cruel. His anger is a weapon, unforged steel, waiting for the right hand to temper it (a hand with a lying smile, with cruel eyes, with burned broken bruised bound wings).

 

O6 ; snow

His anger is snow, a whirling blizzard without care without regret without aim. It spirals out of his control, it eats even those he would save. It is not a weapon but a wound, dug deep into the heart of him, a weather system that changes not with the seasons but with success and retribution.

 

O7 ; motorcycle

Zelgius is violence in his hands and unfettered destruction, waiting to be allowed to roar free. He lets Sephiran play him like an instrument, lets the leash be tied around his neck, submits willingly to the shackles and the orders. But that power is there, underneath the surface—it waits to be harnessed, it waits to be used, expecting and ready only for the command.

 

O8 ; coffee

Sephiran's lips are bitter, but his touch is sweet. There's a darkness under his words and lacing his voice, an underlying layer of grief that never leaves him. He sucks sustenance from Zelgius' skin, sweet cream to temper the bite of his sharp lying tongue.

 

O9 ; medicine

His hands are medicine, a balm that soothes sores and breaks earned in his name. His fingers know where the worst wounds are, they seal them closed, his lips seal the gashes left in his soul. Sephiran makes anew of tempered steel what once before was only burnished iron.

 

1O ; chocolate

Sephiran's hands are smooth, unscarred, soft skin and warm touches, silk hiding steel. Zelgius' hands are calloused from four decades wielding a sword, scars pepper the backs of his knuckles, scrapes and scratches demarcate the lines of his fingers. Sephiran touches him, all soft and warm, and he melts, like chocolate in a hot summer day.

 

11 ; ambition

Zelgius knows he asks too much, to succeed, to fill shoes too large for him to begin with. He presumes too much, to touch his Sage's hand, to hold him while he cries in his sleep. But he wants (all and more) no matter the consequences at the end of the road.

 

12 ; tattoo

His heartbeat is like a drum, locked inside his ears, echoing in his armour. His mouth tastes like the tang of swordmetal and the iron of blood, the elation of the battle high. The pulsing pounding drowns out his fears, makes silent his regrets, for the clang of blades and the spark of steel.

 

13 ; magic

He wields light in his hands like the rays of divine judgment, passed down to him from on high. Zelgius knows the truth.

Not _like: as._

 

14 ; inch

Sephiran has only an inch left to him, only an inch not polluted and drowned by sorrow and rage and the broken wings he carries as weight of his sins. That is all he has to give: that inch, that single inch, but Zelgius takes that inch, never asks more, loves it like it is worth more than any single other thing ever placed on the earth. He hands Sephiran a mile in return, and he breaks little pieces off that mile until they each only have an inch left—but it's an inch, and an inch is more than nothing.

 

15 ; myth

Once, there was a man who could soar the air, the first of his kind. Once, he fell from the skies, broken by his traitorous heart. He was forgotten, name erased, chained to the earth for his greatest mistake.

 

16 ; epic

The bards sing songs, still, so many years later, of the mighty lion, of the ageless dragon king, of the woman with two swords and no fear. They sing songs of the three heroes, lost to time, or battle, or closed borders and apathetic hatred.

They sing no songs of the medallion, or of the man with the dark wings who was as old as the world and who tied the broken spirit to it, they sing no songs of his sacrifice—his mark is lost and forgotten, and his children are massacred in the name of the woman who helped to make the first.

 

17 ; rock & roll

His name is Zelgius, and he is young. He is not broken inside, he trusts without reason.

He shows Sephiran the mark that curses his back, and Sephiran finds himself trusting in return.

 

18 ; disco

Sephiran's plan is a dance, intricate, wily, complex. Zelgius mirrors his sage's steps, follows to the music, but never quite fast enough. He follows behind, always a motion too slow for Sephiran's retreating back.

 

19 ; abnormal

Dheginsea pulls him free from the water, pulls him free from the rocks, pulls him free from the fire and the sword. _What good is a bird that cannot fly,_ he whispers, brokenly, his black wings trailing water on the ground. _What good is a bird that cannot sing._

 

2O ; universe

There is chaos and evil in the world, ruining it like an infection in the blood. There is good, too, hiding away, secreted and silent. It comes in sad blue eyes and heavy armour, it comes in how she could have been his, it comes in a mercy blow before the end of the world.

 

21 ; gold

Herons are golden, sun-clad creatures, radiant in their existence, that soar in loops and whorls. They scatter rays of light on the water as they land, they cry in voices like liquid music, songs that could rouse the dead.

He hides in shadows of broken, half-grown trees, and resents their flight for the reminders it brings to his shattered skeletal body.

 

22 ; silver

The light that flashes from his blade, his armour, is more brilliant that the sun. He moves with a liquid grace that speaks more to his heritage than his forever-twenty physique.

Zelgius' shadow is a spectre from his past that haunts the edges of Sephiran's eyes, with long dark hair and flashing eyes and the same liquid steel.

 

23 ; river

Time flows on after the tower falls. The heroes age and decay, eventually dust in unmarked graves and poetic voices in legends.

He goes on, unchanging, endless, standing guard over a sleeping goddess while he himself is a walking corpse—waiting to be dust in his own ground, waiting to be only the villain in his legends.

 

24 ; wager

 _1000 years,_ he had pleaded, when he was naïve and fearful, wishing only to see another dawn. _1000 years,_ he had cursed, when he was jaded and vengeful, wanting revenge and justice for unimagined sins. _1000 years,_ he had whispered, when he was forgiven and freed, left to sleep at last.

 

25 ; wind

The mountains of Goldoa are jagged and rocky and empty. The wind that whips between the peaks chills, drowns, kills. It whispers her name to him, like a poison in his ears: _Altina._

 

26 ; jazz

His hands never shake, his gaze never falters. His steps do not slow.

But his heart aches, it aches every time he thinks of the burned blackened soul of the forest, of wings that don't fly, of brands burned into skin and the sin that he originated.

 

27 ; crystal 

If he had been able to tell the future, would Sephiran have stopped, stopped before there was a broken body in a pool of blood with glazed blue eyes and a sword with all the light gone out of it? Would he have stopped before he held the infant with his eyes and Altina's hair and the brand burned into her skin? Would he have stopped himself at the beginning, stopped himself before his first flight, stopped himself before the endless path of dominoes that lead him, alone, to the end of the world?

 

28 ; blues

Sephiran does not regret Zelgius dead with a sword in his hand, for he picked that fate himself. He does not regret bleeding on a cold flagstone floor, too weak to reach the book that has fallen from his hands, for he wished that fate for longer than any mortal should live.

He regrets only the anguish in Sanaki's eyes, and that he gave up, he gave up his daughter again, the second time, out of selfishness and hatred and greed.

 

29 ; club

Perhaps it could be called a mercy blow, what Ike does, to leave Zelgius slumped and still below in the tower. That way he does not have to watch Sephiran bleed out, slow and weakly, on the ground alone and cold.

It is what he has prayed for, and yet, he wishes there was a mercy blow of his own.

 

3O ; den 

It is warm, in his arms. Zelgius makes a bed, any bed, feel safe, like home. Sephiran looks beyond the covers for a moment, and instead curls in—he closes his eyes, and for just one more moment before the end of the world, sleeps.


End file.
